Was Code of Honor racist?

Honestly I never got why this episode has so many apologists. It's not like anyone's trying to crucify the franchise over it, and I'm glad the franchise didn't crash and burn because of this. But let's face it, they did screw up here and it could've been easily avoided. Let's just all admit it and move on.

It's kind of ironic that the third episode of Stargate was exactly the same way. Tribal Mongolians kidnap Carter. Only they end up trading for her. And then at the end Carter has to end up fighting the tribal leader, proving she is a strong, blonde, short haired, badass female.

Both the third episode of their series. Both in the running for worst in series. Both with very similar plots.

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The similar story elements are not so surprising -- Katharyn Powers co-wrote "Code of Honor" and wrote "Emancipation."

They are both abysmal episodes often considered the nadir of each respective series, too. Not a great line on her resume.

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"Emancipation" is completely ridiculous in the way it portrays Mongols. The idea that they would've sequestered and marginalized their women is ludicrous. A horse nomad society doesn't have the luxury of keeping half its population isolated and uninvolved in society. Everyone has to be mobile and able to carry their weight. Traditionally, nomadic pastoralists like the Mongols have had far more gender equality than sedentary agrarian or urban societies, because they've had to. Mongol women were trained in combat and participated in political decision-making.

Sure, one could argue that these are Mongols who've been living on an alien planet for centuries and diverged from the original culture, but the episode showed that they still lived as nomads, so there's no way sequestering their women would be viable.

Also, there's the ludicrous inconsistency of showing a society that insists on veiling its women yet dresses Carter in an outfit that shows off a huge amount of cleavage. It doesn't work that way.

This isn't about the episode dealing with racism, this is about the episode itself being made with racist intentions. Despite portions of the script detailing that the inhabitants are not all black, the director specifically wanted ALL OF THE PLANET'S INHABITANTS to be portrayed by black people.

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On the other hand, before TNG, humanoid aliens were almost always played by white people. When I first saw "Code of Honor," I found it refreshing that they'd finally broken from that pattern. Now when I look back on it, I see the problems with how it was done, but at the time it felt like progress. At least we weren't being shown a whole galaxy of white people anymore.

To add even more outlandishness to this episode, it also features this 'technologically advanced humanoid race' as primitives who solve conflicts through open death matches, customs that allow for kidnapping and stereotypical african accents.

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I dispute the assumption that any of those things are "primitive." First off, African accents are not primitive, and it's offensive that you'd imply that they automatically are. People don't have to speak with an American or British accent to be advanced. There are plenty of advanced, prosperous urban populations in Africa where they do indeed speak with African accents.

Vulcan was portrayed as using death matches in "Amok Time," and nobody's ever accused them of being primitive. In fact, the modern furor over "Code of Honor"'s racial problems has obscured the fact that when the episode first debuted, the main source of fan outrage was the extent to which it felt like an imitation of "Amok Time."

Moreover, plenty of modern cultures employ institutionalized violence, executions, war as a political tool, etc. It's naive to treat the societal acceptance of violence as in any way "primitive." The Roman Empire was the most advanced and sophisticated civilization in the West prior to the Renaissance, and it had institutionalized blood sports. If anything, primitive societies were generally more peaceful toward their own members than more "advanced" societies have tended to be.

The same goes for kidnapping -- there's nothing about it that equates with primitivism specifically. Kidnapping is big business for organized crime in many Latin American countries. These things are bad, yes, but it's invalid to call them primitive. They're part of many modern, advanced societies.

I find Gene's decision to fire the director of this episode a bit ironic because even he wasn't immune to mis-portraying his own views. For someone who preached and insisted that mankind be portrayed in a super perfect positive light, he sure dropped the ball when a woman possessed Kirk utters this line "It is better to be dead than to live alone in the body of a woman."

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But Janice Lester was insane. It doesn't make sense to assume that her words were meant to represent the truth. She was meant to be twisted and deranged because she couldn't accept being a woman, because she hated what she was. True, there was a lot of chauvinism in the episode -- the idea was that a woman aspiring to do a man's job was irrational and that she should instead be content with the roles available to women. But choosing that particular line as representative of what Roddenberry actually believed is simply wrong.

If you argue Chakotay is racist you should also be making the same claim for Bashir.

...He's Arabic, right? Did they, perhaps, think the character would not be likable if he had an Arabic accent or showed any signs of having an Islamic background?

Of course that's not what they were thinking. That's just how they wrote the character, and he happened to be given an Arabic name because the actor is from an Arabic background. Chakotay's spiritualism stuff is more an effect of lazy research.

But if Earth is one unified government, then the human population should be about 1/4 Asian and 1/4 Arabic, no?

If you argue Chakotay is racist you should also be making the same claim for Bashir.

...He's Arabic, right? Did they, perhaps, think the character would not be likable if he had an Arabic accent or showed any signs of having an Islamic background?

Of course that's not what they were thinking. That's just how they wrote the character, and he happened to be given an Arabic name because the actor is from an Arabic background. Chakotay's spiritualism stuff is more an effect of lazy research.

But if Earth is one unified government, then the human population should be about 1/4 Asian and 1/4 Arabic, no?

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Stereotypical potrayal of American Indians on TV as being spiritual is rampant and well-known. I didn't say Chakotay was racist. Just one more guy on the great wheel of stereotypicalness.

As someone else said, it wasn't in your face. And I would say on a list of his defining characteristics, "Being a spiritual Indian" is about 4rth or fifth. But it is there.

Maybe I shouldn't have said, "Don't get me started on Chakotay" as if he were worse than what happened in "Journey's End" (The TNG ep). He isn't.

There are so many folks here who will defend anything based on things that don't even exist. I posted a while ago that this episode was racist, and I had fans coming in saying "Why would you assume the entire planet's population is black?". To which I said "because.... we didn't see one single non-black native on this planet?"

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But just why is an episode that shows only black natives on a planet racist?

Before Europeans came to Australia, there were only Aborigenes.

Would you complain if the entire planet's population was nothing but red colored three-legged lizards? Where are the green and orange and four-legged ones?

But just why is an episode that shows only black natives on a planet racist?

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Because a few episodes later, we're introduced to a planet that's populated only by blue eyed, blonde, scantly clad white people who welcome our characters with hugs and kisses. A planet so rich, pure and hands on that it even compelled Worf to say "Nice planet".

So in one season, the blacks get the barbaric, mean spirited and kidnap endorsing planet, while the whites get the innocent, happy and blissful planet. While our crew would no doubt encounter many other planets with humanoids populated again by all white people, black people only get one planet to call their own, and it's in the episode one that the cast and crew were willing to call a racist piece of sh**.

But just why is an episode that shows only black natives on a planet racist?

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Because a few episodes later, we're introduced to a planet that's populated only by blue eyed, blonde, scantly clad white people who welcome our characters with hugs and kisses. A planet so rich, pure and hands on that it even compelled Worf to say "Nice planet".

So in one season, the blacks get the barbaric, mean spirited and kidnap endorsing planet, while the whites get the innocent, happy and blissful planet. While our crew would no doubt encounter many other planets with humanoids populated again by all white people, black people only get one planet to call their own, and it's in the episode one that the cast and crew were willing to call a racist piece of sh**.

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I always figured that the Edo in Justice were an homage to the Eloi in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, specifically the 1960s film, in which the Eloi are all small, attractive, blond, and blue-eyed. In both cases, there is a menace and threat behind the scenes of the apparent utopia and life of ease.

In both cases, there is a menace and threat behind the scenes of the apparent utopia and life of ease.

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But some of the Edo were open to just let Wesley go, even having the great god thing just shrug it off in the end. In Code of Honor, not only are there no Ligonians who sympathize with our characters, but the very mention of bringing up his kidnapping of Tasha Yar brings cheers from the crowd. And when Picard doesn't want Yar to fight to the death, we get this lovely piece.

Lutan: THAN YOU SHALL HAVE TREATY, NO VACCINE, AND NO LIEUTENANT YAR!!

Yep. Nothing racist about casting all black actors as this barbaric race, is there? He openly shouts out at Picard by threatening to keep Tasha Yar all to himself while at the same time allowing millions of innocents die, and all the Ligonians are for it!

In both cases, there is a menace and threat behind the scenes of the apparent utopia and life of ease.

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But some of the Edo were open to just let Wesley go, even having the great god thing just shrug it off in the end. In Code of Honor, not only are there no Ligonians who sympathize with our characters, but the very mention of bringing up his kidnapping of Tasha Yar brings cheers from the crowd. And when Picard doesn't want Yar to fight to the death, we get this lovely piece.

Lutan: THAN YOU SHALL HAVE TREATY, NO VACCINE, AND NO LIEUTENANT YAR!!

Yep. Nothing racist about casting all black actors as this barbaric race, is there?

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I don't think that's fair, because we've seen dozens of alien races in Trek that were just as "barbaric" and were played by all-white actors. The Capellans in "Friday's Child" spring to mind just off the top of my head. And sticking just to the first season of TNG, we have the Bandi in "Encounter at Farpoint" (a technologically backward people enslaving and torturing an innocent alien), the murderous and warlike Anticans and Selay of "Lonely Among Us" (played under their makeup by white actors like Marc Alaimo and John Durbin), the oppressive matriarchy of Angel One, the wartorn Mordanians of "Too Short a Season," the child-abducting Aldeans of "When the Bough Breaks," the ruthless Minosian arms dealer in "The Arsenal of Freedom," the drug-dealer Brekkians of "Symbiosis," and the Romulans of "The Neutral Zone" -- all guilty of "barbaric" behavior, all played by white actors.

It's just the nature of an episodic space-adventure series that the majority of aliens the cast encounters are going to be antagonistic in one way or another. So if you refused to cast nonwhite actors as villains, you'd give them fewer opportunities to play a part in the series at all. Like I said, in 1987 it was rare for aliens to be played by black people at all. Lando Calrissian was about it. However problematic it may appear now, at the time it was actually a small step forward, even if it did turn out to be a misstep. This is the nature of progress. What seems progressive at an early stage (like the miniskirts of the TOS women's uniforms) comes to be seen as backward later on when society has progressed well beyond it.

And Trek did improve on it later on, of course. In addition to having Michael Dorn as the featured Klingon (even if he did fall into the "angry black man" stereotype to an unfortunate degree, at least until DS9 started writing him better), we got increasingly multiethnic casting for major alien races like Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Vulcans, and Bajorans.

Alright. Give me one planet that's been featured in Star Trek that has an all black population who aren't barbaric.

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I reject the premise of the question. You're selecting the terms in order to force the interpretation you want. The point is that there are plenty of "barbaric" cultures in Trek (and your own use of the loaded and ethnocentric word "barbaric" is rather offensive in itself), so there's nothing unique about this one in terms of how it was written. Nobody's denying that there were some missteps made in "Code of Honor," but you're caricaturing and misrepresenting things for the sake of being inflammatory, and that doesn't achieve anything positive.

I see more apologetic explanations and justifications... I still don't see how anyone can look at that episode and not wonder what the heck they were thinking when looking at it on set. It was a huge mistake and one that was easily avoidable.

But just why is an episode that shows only black natives on a planet racist?

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Because a few episodes later, we're introduced to a planet that's populated only by blue eyed, blonde, scantly clad white people who welcome our characters with hugs and kisses. A planet so rich, pure and hands on that it even compelled Worf to say "Nice planet".